Will Bradley Pay for Gates’ Ouster? : Politics: Mayor won the battle, but his popularity has dropped and some are wondering if he should have a term limit.

Basking in the afterglow of an apparent triumph over Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, Mayor Tom Bradley and his staff have turned to mapping a new order for the Los Angeles Police Department while charting their next moves in the ongoing Rodney G. King controversy.

“The bottom line is (Bradley) won the ballgame,” said political consultant Joseph Cerrell. “There’s no asterisk that says it was a cheap win (or) a sloppy operation . . . He got rid of Daryl Gates. That is important to Bradley personally and politically.”

In finally wresting an April, 1992, retirement date from his longtime adversary, however, Bradley may have paid a steep political price.

His decision to seize the King beating as a way to oust Gates has brought a dramatic drop in the mayor’s rating in The Times Poll, with slightly less than half of Los Angeles residents approving of his job performance. And his disapproval rating, of 41%, is his worst in a decade.

Moreover, at a time when voters are embracing the concept of term limits, Bradley may have inadvertently raised the sensitive issue of his own tenure of 18 years in office by insisting that the chief of police has served too long after 13 years.

“I think the unintended effect of Gates’ departure has been to focus attention on incumbency and longevity,” said Arnold Steinberg, a Republican political consultant. “The mayor has shown the same insensitivity as the chief. Both men have had substantial accomplishments for which they have been praised. But each wants to come out with one too many encores. It’s like a movie that goes too long.”

Midway through an unprecedented fifth term, the 73-year-old mayor shows no signs of slowing--as the intensity of his drawn-out battle with Gates demonstrated. And, although he reportedly is undecided about his future, many political experts say they now expect the mayor to use his successful assault on Gates as a springboard to launch a bid for a record sixth term in 1993.

Sources close to Bradley say that, in typical fashion, the mayor has remained mum about any possible reelection plans. He refused to be interviewed for this report.

“That’s the million-dollar question reporters like to ask the mayor,” said Bradley spokesman Bill Chandler. “Each time they ask, he has replied that he hasn’t even thought about what he might do in 1993.”

Looking ahead, political analysts suggest that the mayoral field will be crowded and it is too early to count Bradley out. They say that, barring any more clashes with Gates or further controversy in the King crisis, the mayor has emerged from a long, hot summer at City Hall as a political survivor.

“If, indeed, things calm down and Gates makes a graceful exit . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if Bradley is seriously taking his political pulse with an eye toward running again,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior associate at the Center for Politics and Policy at Claremont Graduate School.

Whether Bradley can recover from his bitter war with Gates as well as an ethics scandal that has dogged him since early 1989 is unknown. For the time being, the mayor and his staff are busy trying to shore up support on the City Council for the entire package of Police Department reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission. These include changing City Charter provisions regarding the selection and tenure of a new chief of police, including a limit of two five-year terms.

One key recommendation that Bradley wants his Police Commission to implement immediately is the concept of community-based policing, where officers spend an hour a day outside of their squad cars mingling with citizens.

The mayor has said that Gates will play no role in choosing his successor and that the Police Commission will monitor his actions during the next nine months as reforms are implemented.

Relegating the embattled chief to lame-duck status proved to be a formidable task for the mayor.

Both Bradley and his chief of staff, Mark Fabiani, wasted no time in deciding that the videotaped beating of a black Altadena motorist on March 3 presented a golden opportunity to make a move on Gates, according to knowledgeable City Hall sources who asked not to be identified.

Last fall, the mayor’s office had begun to crank up the heat on a long-simmering feud with the police chief by ordering an exhaustive $1-million management audit of the Police Department and appointing two new police commissioners--lawyers Dan Garcia and Melanie Lomax. They would later engineer an ill-fated attempt to put Gates on leave at the height of the King crisis--a move that outraged the City Council and led to widespread criticism of the mayor.

It took only 30 days after the King beating for Bradley to go before a live television audience and demand that Gates must go. The “gutsy” decision, in the words of one Bradley opponent on the council, marked a rare departure from the nonconfrontational approach that Bradley had perfected.

“His style is to try to get along, go along, be a good guy, and he tries to work quietly behind the scenes,” Cerrell said. “In this case, he was willing to give it his all because he and Gates had been at loggerheads for an awful long time. He felt this was an opportunity to deliver a knockout punch.”

But the move posed a political gamble for the mayor. He risked alienating a large segment of his traditional support among conservatives in the downtown business community and middle-class whites in the San Fernando Valley, who were solid Gates backers.

“I think that was a divisive move in many respects,” Bebitch Jeffe said. “It really did leave his vulnerability open. You can’t demand someone’s resignation when you have no control to make him resign. So, in the black community he looked powerless and unable to keep his word, and in the white community he appeared divisive and (to be) pandering to one segment of the city.”

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Bradley said he waited 30 days for Gates “to get the message” before calling on him to resign.

“I think, in fact, that it was something that required the courage of my convictions,” the mayor said. “I ought to say it. I ought to do it. That’s what I did, and I couldn’t worry about what the public reaction is going to be, what the political consequences might be.”

The mayor’s public sparring with Gates resulted in a significant drop in his popularity rating. Several days after the King beating, 61% of the city’s residents polled by The Times said they approved of the mayor, a significant rebound from the 41% approval rating he received during the ethics scandal in September, 1989.

But a Times Poll last month showed that the approval rating again declined, to 48%. The mayor’s disapproval rating was 41% overall and 48% among whites.

Furthermore, Los Angeles residents seemed to be particularly critical of the mayor’s action against Gates--60% said that Bradley called for the chief to step aside because it would help him politically while 31% said he did it for the good of the city.

Bradley spokesman Chandler attributed the results to “solely the way the media portrayed this as Bradley versus Gates . . . as if that was the only issue.”

Last month, the political momentum changed for the mayor when the independent citizens commission he had appointed to investigate the Police Department produced a stinging report. The panel found a department that tolerated racism, sexism and excessive force, and called upon Gates to retire. It was Bradley who had persuaded highly respected career diplomat Warren Christopher to chair the independent panel.

The report not only served to boost the mayor politically, but it also paved the way for Gates to set a retirement date.

“If the Christopher Commission had not been so critical of Gates, then Bradley would have been a big loser,” said Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley political science instructor. “But the Christopher Commission came out with a very critical report, many people in the police community outside of Los Angeles were critical of Gates and even Gates’ supporters on the council helped to ease him out. All of those things end up vindicating Bradley.”

But, according to political analysts, the Christopher findings also raise important questions about the mayor: If the LAPD has for years been riddled with problems of racism and police brutality, why did it take the beating of Rodney King for Bradley, a former police lieutenant who spent 20 years in a blue uniform, to react?

While he does not have the authority to fire Gates, the mayor appoints the five members of the Police Commission who oversee the police chief and the Police Department. For years, Bradley and City Council members have awarded Gates outstanding evaluation ratings as chief of police.

“When he first held a press conference and said Gates must go, my question was . . . where was Tom Bradley’s leadership before the videotape?” said Allen Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based Republican consultant.

Bradley recently acknowledged that he was aware of problems within the Police Department.

“I . . . had seen evidence of it from time to time and knew there was much more of this racism and excessive use of force present in that department. Without something of a dramatic fashion to hit the people squarely between the eyes, there was no way that you could convince the majority of the people in the city that these kind of (abuses) happen,” he told AP.

Another question raised by the Christopher panel, political experts say, involves the issue of term limits. If the Christopher panel concluded that two five-year terms are an appropriate limit for the chief of police, aren’t 18 years enough for the mayor?

Cain said that voter approval of Proposition 140, which sets term limits for state legislators, makes it clear that the public favors restricting the number of years politicians stay in office.

“I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel that . . . enough is enough,” Cain said. “These guys (Bradley and Gates) have been fighting ever since Gates has been chief.”

The reasons for the term limits suggested for the chief of police do not apply to the mayor, said Bradley spokesman Chandler.

“The Civil Service system has given almost across-the-board protection to the chief of police,” he said. “Elected officials come up for election every four years and the public has the opportunity to voice their opinion at that time.”

Bradley’s Job Rating

Here is a look at Mayor Tom Bradley’s popularity rating based on polls of Los Angeles residents from 1985 to the time of the ethics scandal involving the mayor’s personal finances in 1989 through the Rodney G. King controversy that began in March of 1991.

Whites Blacks Latinos All March, 1985 Approve 71% 80% 79% 76% Disapprove 21 15 11 16 Don’t know 8 5 10 8 May, 1989 Approve 47 60 65 53 Disapprove 37 24 15 30 Don’t know 16 16 20 17 Sept., 1989 Approve 38 51 45 41 Disapprove 42 20 29 37 Don’t know 20 29 26 22 March 8, ’91 Approve 56 66 66 61 Disapprove 34 27 22 28 Don’t know 10 7 12 11 March 21, ’91 Approve 49 54 66 57 Disapprove 41 34 18 30 Don’t know 10 12 16 13 April 9, 1991 Approve 41 64 63 53 Disapprove 48 31 32 39 Don’t know 11 5 5 8 July, 1991 Approve 42 57 52 48 Disapprove 48 34 35 41 Don’t know 10 9 13 11

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times Poll